Ranking Beyoncé’s songs on feature importance. Timbre coefficient c02 stands out.


K-Nearest Neighbour with timbre coefficient c02, algorithm can make a fair prediction on Beyoncé’s older and newer music based on this coefficient.


Beyoncé’s discography, and how has her music changed over time?

Nowadays, Beyoncé is one of my favorite artists. One of the reasons I like to listen to Beyoncé’s music is because she has such a diverse style in her albums. You can find various music genres come back in her music, like R&B, soul, (dance)pop, hiphop, and funk. So far she has produced the following albums, among others:

On extravagant moments I like to listen to 4, if I want to listen to old pop classics like Halo, I put on I Am Sacha Fierce, and when I’m not feeling well I listen to Lemonade for a boost of self-confidence and great hiphop-beats. Because I like Beyoncé’s diversity in styles and genres between and in her albums, I will research with the SpotifyR features how her music has developed over the seven albums I’ve mentioned above. I personally notice a number of differences between her albums, for example that her newer albums contain less acoustic songs and that the overall vibe is less positive. Therefore, I’m going to research the acousticness and valence of her albums. I’m expecting them to have shifted downwards after the release of her album Beyoncé, because this album is known for having a different style compared to Beyoncé’s earlier albums (it’s been said a lot that her later albums contained a different, lower end hip hop bass). In addition, I’m interested in the danceability, energy, and speechiness of her albums. However, I think these features are very high for all her albums, and that no major differences will be seen. Let’s see if this assumption is correct!

Furthermore, I am curious in the key variation of Beyoncé’s songs and albums, so I will take a look at that. Specifically, I will dive deeper in Beyoncé’s work by visualizing the specific key changes in the song Love On Top, since this song is well known for having “definitively the greatest key changes in all pop music”.

Albums show a high diversity in character. A shift in valence and acousticness over time.


No clear changes in speechiness, so this feature has been constant in Beyoncé’s music.


Albums show a diversity in keys, which means a contrast between the songs in her albums.


Structure of Love On Top. Timbre and pitch features shown in self-similarity matrix.


Chromagram of Love On Top. Here, the modulations are shown more clearly.


In this chromagram, the key changes/modulations of Love On Top (which I explained in the self-similarity matrix) are shown more clearly. As you can see, after 180 seconds the song switches from C major to Db major, D major, Eb major, and lastly to E major.

Songs of the album Beyoncé show a similar tempo, which is a different pattern than the songs of the other albums, which have a more varied tempo.


Tempograms of Hip Hop Star and Heaven.The tempo of Hip Hop Star appears very constant, while Heaven has much *inconsistency**.


Albums show major difference in timbre coefficient c02.